December 12, 2019. The Game Awards. Originally announced at E3 2019 and presented to the public at the 2019 TGA, the Xbox Series X was announced as the most powerful console ever made. And as one of the marketing trump cards, its 12 teraflops, superior to the 10.3 presented by the PlayStation 5, with Phil Spencer even publicly saying he was satisfied with this superiority.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Battlefield 2042. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. Control: Ultimate Edition. DiRT 5. Far Cry 5. Gotham Knights. Hogwarts Legacy. Immortals Phoenix Rising. Monster Hunter Rise. Need For Speed Unbound. Resident Evil 4. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition. The Witcher 3: Complete Edition. The Callisto Protocol. Atomic Hearts.
What do all these games have in common? They all run better on PlayStation than on Xbox. And if you think that's a lot of games, you should know that this list still includes a large number of other games, including some with marketing agreements with Microsoft itself, such as Atomic Hearts and Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
And if you have any doubts about the veracity of this information, it's already public knowledge that Microsoft itself is investigating why Sony's console is performing better than the Xbox, which has more teraflops. click here.
But how is that possible?
Well, first let's find out what a teraflop is. But before that, I think it's important to talk about some other terms, which are CUs, threads and frequencies. CUs are the computational units, which are located on the CPU and have their own frequency.
And what are threads? Threads are virtual sequences of instructions given to a CPU. That said, multiplying the frequencies at which the CPUs work together with the number of threads that are processed on the cores, we get the famous teraflop.
As the flop has the same multiple units as the byte and the Hertz, the term 1 Teraflop/s is equivalent to 1 trillion floating point operations per second. Floating point is a digital representation format for rational numbers, which is used in computers.
Teraflops basically serve as a metric of a machine's raw performance. In general, the more Teraflops a computer, processor or video card achieves, the faster it is and the more processing power it offers.
That said, how is the PlayStation 5 outperforming the Xbox?
First of all, it's worth making it clear that this development is not restricted to the two consoles mentioned. For example, today we have a huge growth in the "handheld computer" market, such as the ROG Ally, or the Steam Deck.
In the case of the Valve device, a performance of 1.6 teraflops is calculated, while the ROG Ally has 8.6. In fact, there is a noticeable difference in performance between them, but it's not as great as the difference in figures shows. And if you think about it, the ROG has a little less than the PlayStation 5, but the performance difference is absurd, to the point of not even being considered.
Recently, Digital Foundry, which is one of the biggest references when it comes to technical terms, said that "teraflop is still a theoretical fact that exploded in the face of the Series X and no longer matters, not even from a marketing point of view".
DF:"The teraflop is still a theoretical fact that has been blown up in the face of Series X and that is no longer of interest even from a marketing point of view". Rog Ally has 8.6, and the Steam Deck 1.6, so Ally isn't close to being a PS5. Just a reference for identical architectures. pic.twitter.com/1AzDjUoW7V
- Retro Gamer (@RetroGamer_74) August 4, 2023
And how curious is that? I don't know if you remember, but the PS5 announcement was made in a very fragmented way, and we had a presentation called "Road to PS5", in which Mark Cerny, engineer who developed the PS5 says that it is dangerous to take the teraflop as an absolute indicator of performance.
With Mark Cerny having been proven correct in his statement over the years, with Digital Foundry's recent statement and with Microsoft avoiding marketing the metric, it's possible to come to the conclusion that teraflops are no longer as important as they once were. Of course, as a theoretical value, it won't lose strength, but in practice, it hasn't made sense to use it as a metric.
The PlayStation 5, even with fewer teraflops, performs more consistently than the Xbox Series X, and this is thanks to the architecture developed by Mark Cerny and his team of engineers. Much has been said about the PS5's SSD, but I believe what makes the real difference in Sony's console is the I/O decompression block, which was created to handle all the tasks that require GPU/CPU resources or a huge pool of memory to compensate.
Microsoft has Direct Storage on the PC which has a similar function, but it doesn't seem to have achieved the same success as the PS5. But these are issues for another time.
A more reflective theory...
I challenge you to a less technical thought that could also explain this difference: sales. It's common knowledge that games tend to sell much more on PlayStation than on other platforms, including third-party games. Perhaps this is a consequence of the subscription service modality with Game Pass, in the case of Xbox, which accommodates and discourages players from buying games.
But I believe that this factor only increases the consequence because this smaller number of sales has existed since before the service, of course, in a smaller disparity. More sales means more profits. If Sony's console sells more, it generates more profit, so it might be better to invest more development time in the platform because the return would be greater.
I believe it does have a certain influence, but we have to take other factors into consideration, such as the longer delay in sending out the GDKs (development kits), and some developers saying that it's not as easy to deal with as the PS5. There's also the fact that there's the Xbox Series S, which is a console with much lower specifications than the other two, and which puts a lot of pressure on development because it needs to have all the functions of its stronger brother.
All these factors have consequences. An example of the difficulty exerted by the Series S is Baldur's Gate III, which is temporarily exclusive to PlayStation because the weaker Xbox console was unable to run the game satisfactorily. An example in relation to sales are the games, of which there are many, which are not on the Xbox because it's simply not worth it financially.
Well, there are many factors that can explain how the PlayStation 5 performs better than the Xbox, or how the ROG Ally is not so superior to the Steam Deck. But one thing's for sure, the much-hyped teraflop is no longer an absolute performance metric these days, and so, the myth of teraflops comes to an end.
OBS: This text reflects my opinion, taking into account the research carried out on the subject and the brief knowledge I possess. Don't take this text as absolute truth and if there are any errors, to err is human kkkk.
See also:
EA Sports FC 24 - All about the immersive Matchday
Baldur's Gate 3 surpasses 500,000 simultaneous players on Steam
Affogato, the strategic anime and magic RPG, will be released on August 17th on Steam
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